Modern Toss creator and former Leicester resident Mick Bunnage, also of cult musos Deep Freeze Mice

Mick Bunnage: Writer, cartoonist, musician. He once worked for Honey magazine, interviewed Vivienne Westwood, and got told to “get on with it” at the old Abbey Park music festival.

Mick Bunnage is a dream interviewee. The former musician, Loaded writer, cartoonist and Leicester resident has an unerring habit of making the mundane seem peculiarly jocular. Even when he’s trying to pronounce the address of his old stomping ground in Belgrave.

Mick has just seen the second season of cult comedy series Modern Toss launched on late-night Channel 4. It sees the return of such unlikely cartoon characters as Mr Tourette, the foul-mouthed signwriter, and Alan, the sociopathic bearded squiggle.

It’s the sort of dry, surreal humour that Leicester folk revel in, says Mick, who was a man about town back in the high-unemployment days of the early ’80s.

“I’m having flashbacks,” gasps the 49-year-old, as the off-the-cuff interview begins. So Mick starts with the facts.

Having graduated from Leeds University with a politics degree, the Essex boy moved to Leicester to live with his unorthodox band Deep Freeze Mice.

“He had Bourbon legs and a little Scorsese head with a speech bubble which probably said something like ‘Alright, yeah?’”

There was also the crisp league table, a sort of World Cup for savoury snacks.

“I remember Walkers won, I think it was Walkers’ cheese and onion. It had to be, really.”

Alan, the sociopathic bearded squiggle. Named after Alan Jenkins, former incumbent of Cordelia Studios in Conduit Street. Member of Deep Freeze Mice.

Modern Toss – the potty-mouthed comic which spawned several books, a national newspaper cartoon strip, a website, a TV show and any number of viral emails featuring Mr Tourette – evolved during Mick’s seven years at Loaded.

“We used to muck about quite a lot with silly ideas. Now, we’re like South Park, that’s our business model.”

Both Mick and Jon illustrate and write the gags in the comedy show and Channel 4, he says, has pretty much let them get on with the programme.

“The only thing they’ve ever said to us is, ‘make sure you keep a lot of the swearing in’,” he says.

“There we were, thinking of taking some of the swearing out – we’re a bit bored of it now.”

Channel 4 do have one strict rule – just one C-word per show.

An angry-looking black squiggle called Alan is among the viewers’ favourites.

“Alan is very popular with women, I think they just want to look after him,” says Mick.

“Then there are the Astronauts in Space – I love their pointless bickering – and Drive-by Abuser is really good for getting things off your chest.”

More of this series is made up of live footage, with fewer cartoons than in season one. Mick says they went out the other day and ended up filming “a lot of fat blokes”.

Talk of the show is interrupted by Mick breaking into a brief Leicester Who’s Who – Showaddywaddy, Daniel Lambert, Graham Chapman…

“With the Graham Chapman thing, there’s something about a place like Leicester that brings out the surrealism in people, which is where I think that comes from,” he says.

“It encourages surreal humour. You don’t get that so much in London.

“I met a lot of people who had that surreal sense of humour that you don’t get everywhere, and I think we’ve got a bit of it in our show.

“We certainly had a lot of it in Deep Freeze Mice.

“What’s going on in the city today?” he asks.

Well… there’s a bit of a hoo-hah about installing a statue of Gandhi in Belgrave.